Yoshida: Sony ‘comfortable’ with NGP price point

Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida has said he’s confident the NGP’s price won’t seem unreasonable to gamers, and reiterated that the portable has no direct competition.

“I feel very comfortably that we are going to be hitting it,” Yoshida told Kotaku, speaking of the NGP’s unannounced price point, which the company set internally even before beginning development of the system.

“We definitely consider this is the price that it has to be for people to even consider purchasing it.”

Yoshida said the price is digestible even though “gaming portable devices may not be something people feel like they need”.

The announcement of the PSP’s launch price of $249 in 2004 was met with something approaching horror at the time, a lesson Sony seems to have taken to heart in its price-first approach to creating the new hardware.

Nevertheless, the new console will face more competition than its precursor – something Yoshida denies.

“We are not directly competing with these systems,” he protested. “We have to really create the reason for people to look at the NGP and say, ‘This is what I want.’

“There are more and more options people have now for devices to play games on.”

Speaking of competitors, Sony’s announcement of the NGP may have taken some of the wind out of the 3DS hype machine, and the humbler portable has failed to catch on as strongly as expected.

“We have been watching closely the reaction of other people to the 3DS,” Yoshida said, adding that he doubted a declining market for portable consoles was the soul cause of the 3DS’s surprisingly modest performance.

“I think there are a combination of things. It could have been the line-up of titles. It could have been about the 3D stereoscopic capabilities. It could be about many other things.”

“I was a bit surprised about how (the 3DS) is doing,” he added.

The NGP will be fully revealed at Sony’s event on Monday – 12:30pm PST, 3:30pm EST, 8:30pm BST, 9:30pm CET, 5:30am AEST – with the console’s final name and pricing details expected.